by Tom Miller
I am a border rat. I’ve been one since the day I hopped back and forth between countries over a fallen, rusty barbed-wire fence in the woodland along the Arizona-Mexico line some 40 years ago. Since that act of joyful anarchy, I’ve traveled the entire length of the frontier numerous times, dined and [...]

by Tim Leffel
Am I really that bad of a photographer? Every shot of a building looks crooked. It’s like I got drunk in a cantina and then went on a photography spree around Mexico City, unable to keep the viewfinder straight as I clicked off shots of the sites. A slanted church, a leaning office [...]

by James Michael Dorsey
Grand Bahama, while grand, is a tiny speck of Bahamian Island soaked in rum and populated by those searching for a lifestyle that does not require their presence.
Soon after arriving, I was smitten with the large and beautiful shells known as Conches.  These are the shells you always see bare breasted natives blowing [...]

by Kathleen Spivack
Does language birth the object/word/thing named? Or is it the other way round?
The city of Tours shimmered from the other side of the river Loire. La Touraine, the region, gleamed with its stately chateaux, silvery rivers and pensive gardens. All invited one to stay—forever. It was raining that year; the cows brooded, depressed, [...]

by Victor Walsh
In the afternoon sunlight, the peaks of the Sierra Gorda Mountains in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi have turned the color of burnished medal, while a smoke-like mist hovers in the valley below. On the steep sloped hills lush with vegetation and terraced with coffee beans stands the village of [...]

by Chris Epting
He goes in search of rock star rooms with a grisly past, or “places to check out”––permanently.
When booking a hotel room, what drives your decision? Price? Location? Size? Amenities? I’m drawn to rooms based less on the usual factors. For me, the most seductive quality in a room is if something notable happened [...]

By James Sturz
Tinharé, Brazil
My Portuguese is lousy, but I could guess from the name of our ferry, Biônica de Tinharé, that we were supposed to be feeling energetic. Still, as we pulled out of Salvador for the two-hour ride to the Tinharé Archipelago in February just about everybody on-board was sleeping.
It had been a long [...]

By Pickett Porterfield
The hotel stood on the corner of a dusty square where several dirt streets intersected just outside the crumbling stone walls of the medina. It was a small hotel, with three or four stuffy rooms upstairs and a mildewed bathroom on the roof. A colonnaded veranda opened out onto the street. All day [...]

By Tracy Barnett
MOSTAR, Bosnia-Herzegovina—A maple tree grows out the window of what was once someone’s tidy little flat on the Croatian side of Santica Street, here in the green hills of southern Bosnia and Herzegovina. The leafy limb reaches out, past the bullet holes, past the strands of ivy that dangle loosely in the vacant [...]

by Catherine Watson
The ancient pueblo of Acoma, New Mexico, is perfectly nicknamed: Called the Sky City, it commands the most exotic location of any inhabited place in the United States — the top of a 376-foot-high mesa, a natural citadel of golden rock, an island in the sky.
It’s also amazingly well-disguised.
I’d driven [...]